Report says NOAA quashed evidence of climate/hurricane link
Jostling between officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and researchers who say the agency is ignoring evidence that stronger hurricanes are tied to global warming came into public view again his week when the journal Nature alleged that the agency quashed a report suggesting such a link.
According to Nature, work on a statement representing the consensus view of NOAA researchers began in February, after some complained that the agency was suppressing relevant evidence on global warming's impact on hurricanes. The report was finished in May, Nature says, but was delayed after a Commerce Department official said it needed to be less technical.
The possible link between hurricanes and global warming is a politically touchy subject in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and because of the White House's reluctance to curb the greenhouse gas emissions thought to cause rising temperatures.
Following the release of the Nature article, Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey charged that "the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its antienvironment agenda."
NOAA put the draft of the two-page report online Wednesday evening, following the publication of the Nature article. NOAA spokesman Jordan St. John contested Nature's description of the report's origins, saying it was produced to answer frequent media questions about the possible connection between global warming and hurricanes. St. John added that there was no political pressure against publishing it and that the statement on global warming simply was unfinished by the time NOAA was releasing a packet of information for the beginning of the hurricane season in June.
"Because it wasn't a big deal at the time when it didn't make the deadline, it just kind of hung around," he says. "We didn't get to it."
But that explanation differs substantially from the one NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher was quoted in Nature as giving. According to the article, Lautenbacher said the report could not be released because NOAA could not take an official stand on an area of science that was rapidly changing.
The draft of the paper released by NOAA suggests that global warming is one possible explanation for the rise in the intensity of hurricanes. It also states that further research at NOAA is aimed at determining "whether or not and to what degree human-induced changes to the environment are having an influence on hurricanes."
The Nature article is only the latest in a series of allegations that NOAA is suppressing views about the impact of global warming. Last year, NOAA scientist Tom Knutson, who has published articles citing climate change as an explanation for stronger Atlantic hurricanes, claimed that the agency was preventing him from doing television interviews. In November, the agency faced criticism for asserting in a report that there was "consensus" among its scientists that more intense hurricanes resulted mainly from natural variability.